Video Consultation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Single Center's Experience with Lung Transplant Recipients
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Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has disrupted health care systems worldwide. This is due to both to the reallocation of resources toward COVID-19 patients as well as concern for the risk of nosocomial severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) exposure. The interruption of routine care is especially problematic for patients with chronic conditions requiring regular follow-up, such as lung transplant (LTx) recipients.
Introduction:
New methods such as telemedicine are needed to bridge the gap in follow-up care caused by the pandemic.
Materials and Methods:
A retrospective analysis of video consultations (VCs) in comparison with on-site visits (OSVs) was performed during a 6-week period in an LTx center in Germany. VC included a structured work-up questionnaire and vital sign documentation.
Results:
During the 6-week study period, 75 VCs were performed for 53 patients and 75 OSVs by 51 patients occurred. By the end of our study period, 77% of physician–patient contacts occurred through VC. Physician–patient consultations were reduced by 47% compared with the equivalent time frame in 2019. In 62% of cases, VC resulted in a concrete clinical decision. One COVID-19 patient in home quarantine was admitted due to respiratory failure detected by VC. Patient satisfaction with VC was high.
Discussion:
Implementation of VC helped to reduce the need for OSV and thus the risk of SARS-CoV-2 exposure in our patient cohort. This technology can be adopted to provide care for a wide range of chronic illnesses.
Conclusions:
VC can preserve access to specialist care while reducing SARS-CoV-2 exposure for patients with chronic illnesses during the pandemic.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.12.20093799: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement Consent: All patients provided informed consent prior to transplantation allowing the use of their data for scientific purposes, as approved by the Ethics Committee of Hannover Medical School (Ethics Committee Vote Nr. 2923-2015).
IRB: According to our Ethics Committee, additional approval was not necessary, as data acquisition was retrospective and observational, data was anonymized and the study relied on information collected as part of routine care.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Statistical analysis was performed … SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.12.20093799: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement Consent: All patients provided informed consent prior to transplantation allowing the use of their data for scientific purposes, as approved by the Ethics Committee of Hannover Medical School (Ethics Committee Vote Nr. 2923-2015).
IRB: According to our Ethics Committee, additional approval was not necessary, as data acquisition was retrospective and observational, data was anonymized and the study relied on information collected as part of routine care.Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
Software and Algorithms Sentences Resources Statistical analysis was performed using IBM SPSS v26 (IBM SPSS Statistics, Armonk, NY, USA). SPSSsuggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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